Securing Cloud Storage by Transparent Biometric Cryptography

With the capability of storing huge volumes of data over the Internet, cloud storage has become a popular and desirable service for individuals and enterprises. The security issues, nevertheless, have been the intense debate within the cloud community. Significant attacks can be taken place, the most common being guessing the (poor) passwords. Given weaknesses with verification credentials, malicious attacks have happened across a variety of well-known storage services (i.e. Dropbox and Google Drive) – resulting in loss the privacy and confidentiality of files. Whilst today's use of third-party cryptographic applications can independently encrypt data, it arguably places a significant burden upon the user in terms of manually ciphering/deciphering each file and administering numerous keys in addition to the login password. The field of biometric cryptography applies biometric modalities within cryptography to produce robust bio-crypto keys without having to remember them. There are, nonetheless, still specific flaws associated with the security of the established bio-crypto key and its usability. Users currently should present their biometric modalities intrusively each time a file needs to be encrypted/decrypted – thus leading to cumbersomeness and inconvenience while throughout usage. Transparent biometrics seeks to eliminate the explicit interaction for verification and thereby remove the user inconvenience. However, the application of transparent biometric within bio-cryptography can increase the variability of the biometric sample leading to further challenges on reproducing the bio-crypto key. An innovative bio-cryptographic approach is developed to non-intrusively encrypt/decrypt data by a bio-crypto key established from transparent biometrics on the fly without storing it somewhere using a backpropagation neural network. This approach seeks to handle the shortcomings of the password login, and concurrently removes the usability issues of the third-party cryptographic applications – thus enabling a more secure and usable user-oriented level of encryption to reinforce the security controls within cloud-based storage. The challenge represents the ability of the innovative bio-cryptographic approach to generate a reproducible bio-crypto key by selective transparent biometric modalities including fingerprint, face and keystrokes which are inherently noisier than their traditional counterparts. Accordingly, sets of experiments using functional and practical datasets reflecting a transparent and unconstrained sample collection are conducted to determine the reliability of creating a non-intrusive and repeatable bio-crypto key of a 256-bit length. With numerous samples being acquired in a non-intrusive fashion, the system would be spontaneously able to capture 6 samples within minute window of time. There is a possibility then to trade-off the false rejection against the false acceptance to tackle the high error, as long as the correct key can be generated via at least one successful sample. As such, the experiments demonstrate that a correct key can be generated to the genuine user once a minute and the average FAR was 0.9%, 0.06%, and 0.06% for fingerprint, face, and keystrokes respectively. For further reinforcing the effectiveness of the key generation approach, other sets of experiments are also implemented to determine what impact the multibiometric approach would have upon the performance at the feature phase versus the matching phase. Holistically, the multibiometric key generation approach demonstrates the superiority in generating the bio-crypto key of a 256-bit in comparison with the single biometric approach. In particular, the feature-level fusion outperforms the matching-level fusion at producing the valid correct key with limited illegitimacy attempts in compromising it – 0.02% FAR rate overall. Accordingly, the thesis proposes an innovative bio-cryptosystem architecture by which cloud-independent encryption is provided to protect the users' personal data in a more reliable and usable fashion using non-intrusive multimodal biometrics.Higher Committee of Education Development in Iraq (HCED

Fusion of face and iris biometrics in security verification systems.

Master of Science in Computer Science. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2016.Abstract available in PDF file

DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection

The free access to large-scale public databases, together with the fast progress of deep learning techniques, in particular Generative Adversarial Networks, have led to the generation of very realistic fake content with its corresponding implications towards society in this era of fake news. This survey provides a thorough review of techniques for manipulating face images including DeepFake methods, and methods to detect such manipulations. In particular, four types of facial manipulation are reviewed: i) entire face synthesis, ii) identity swap (DeepFakes), iii) attribute manipulation, and iv) expression swap. For each manipulation group, we provide details regarding manipulation techniques, existing public databases, and key benchmarks for technology evaluation of fake detection methods, including a summary of results from those evaluations. Among all the aspects discussed in the survey, we pay special attention to the latest generation of DeepFakes, highlighting its improvements and challenges for fake detection. In addition to the survey information, we also discuss open issues and future trends that should be considered to advance in the field

One-class Classification: An Approach to Handle Class Imbalance in Multimodal Biometric Authentication

Biometric verification is the process of authenticating a person‟s identity using his/her physiological and behavioural characteristics. It is well-known that multimodal biometric systems can further improve the authentication accuracy by combining information from multiple biometric traits at various levels, namely sensor, feature, match score and decision levels. Fusion at match score level is generally preferred due to the trade-off between information availability and fusion complexity. However, combining match scores poses a number of challenges, when treated as a two-class classification problem due to the highly imbalanced class distributions. Most conventional classifiers assume equally balanced classes. They do not work well when samples of one class vastly outnumber the samples of the other class. These challenges become even more significant, when the fusion is based on user-specific processing due to the limited availability of the genuine samples per user. This thesis aims at exploring the paradigm of one-class classification to advance the classification performance of imbalanced biometric data sets. The contributions of the research can be enumerated as follows. Firstly, a thorough investigation of the various one-class classifiers, including Gaussian Mixture Model, k-Nearest Neighbour, K-means clustering and Support Vector Data Description, has been provided. These classifiers are applied in learning the user-specific and user-independent descriptions for the biometric decision inference. It is demonstrated that the one-class classifiers are particularly useful in handling the imbalanced learning problem in multimodal biometric authentication. User-specific approach is a better alternative with respect to user-independent counterpart because it is able to overcome the so-called within-class sub-concepts problem, which arises very often in multimodal biometric systems due to the existence of user variation. Secondly, a novel adapted score fusion scheme that consists of one-class classifiers and is trained using both the genuine user and impostor samples has been proposed. This method also replaces user-independent by user-specific description to learn the characteristics of the impostor class, and thus, reducing the degree of imbalanced proportion of data for different classes. Extensive experiments are conducted on the BioSecure DS2 and XM2VTS databases to illustrate the potential of the proposed adapted score fusion scheme, which provides a relative improvement in terms of Equal Error Rate of 32% and 20% as compared to the standard sum of scores and likelihood ratio based score fusion, respectively. Thirdly, a hybrid boosting algorithm, called r-ABOC has been developed, which is capable of exploiting the natural capabilities of both the well-known Real AdaBoost and one-class classification to further improve the system performance without causing overfitting. However, unlike the conventional Real AdaBoost, the individual classifiers in the proposed schema are trained on the same data set, but with different parameter choices. This does not only generate a high diversity, which is vital to the success of r-ABOC, but also reduces the number of user-specified parameters. A comprehensive empirical study using the BioSecure DS2 and XM2VTS databases demonstrates that r-ABOC may achieve a performance gain in terms of Half Total Error Rate of up to 28% with respect to other state-of-the-art biometric score fusion techniques. Finally, a Robust Imputation based on Group Method of Data Handling (RIBG) has been proposed to handle the missing data problem in the BioSecure DS2 database. RIBG is able to provide accurate predictions of incomplete score vectors. It is observed to achieve a better performance with respect to the state-of-the-art imputation techniques, including mean, median and k-NN imputations. An important feature of RIBG is that it does not require any parameter fine-tuning, and hence, is amendable to immediate applications